Every business depends on the free flow of information and ideas to improve their products and services. Effective collaboration between people both inside and outside an organization increases product quality, improves product or project development lead times, and reduces costs. However, effective collaboration is often difficult. One issue that hinders effective meetings is that often people are not physically co-located. Traveling to meetings can be very time-consuming when considering lengthy travel times, and can be expensive. For a two or three hour meeting people often will travel a day to the meeting and a day back, especially if the meeting is across country or located in another country or on another continent.
Web (intranet or Internet) meetings or other virtual meetings have become more and more popular thanks to the emergence of high speed Internet connections and reduced prices for high quality web cameras. Web conferences can save large amounts of time and money because meeting participants in remote places can almost instantaneously join a meeting without wasting time and money traveling to the meeting site. Often web meetings can be spontaneously planned because there is no need for airline or hotel reservations and a meeting of an hour or two need not take days of preparations and travel.
An issue with web meetings is that depending on the type of meeting different equipments may be necessary at the end user. For example, some web or Internet meetings are provided by subscribing to a service. These meetings are typically conducted over the Internet with a service provider providing a server to conduct the meeting, herein termed a meeting service server. The connections to the Internet for these types of meetings are sometimes dial up and often quite slow, much slower than a corporate network typically would be. Alternately, meetings can be conducted over a network that is owned by a corporation using a server, herein termed an office communication server, which may be presumed to have greater throughput speed and bandwidth than the World Wide Web or Internet. Typically, client equipment to interface with these two types of servers is specialized and only interfaces with one type of net meeting or the other.